There are many ways to promote your website and one of themost efficient ways is to use search engines. Searchengines are the first stop for most people trying to findinformation, services, and products online. Because ofthis, it is essential that your website appears quickly insearch results.
The Internet contains numerous search engines, some ofwhich offer what is known as paid inclusion. This meansthat you pay the specific search engine an annual fee foryour web page to be included in their index.
Of course, every search engine already has an automatedprogram commonly called a spider that indexes all the webpages it locates online, and it does this for free. Sowhether you pay or not, your web page will eventually beindexed by all Internet search engines, as long as thespider can follow a link to your page. The major issue is,then, how quickly your page is indexed.
A search engine that offers a paid URL inclusion uses anextra spider that is programmed to index the particularpages that have been paid for. The difference between thespider that indexes pages for free and the spider thatindexes only pages for a fee is speed. If you have paid forinclusion, the additional search engine spider will indexyour page immediately.
The debate over paid URL inclusion centers around theannual fee. Since the regular spider of these searchengines would eventually get around to indexing your webpage anyway, why is a renewal fee necessary The fee isnecessary to keep your pages in the search engines index.If you go the route of paid inclusion, you should be awarethat at the end of the pay period, on some search engines,your page will be removed from their index for a certainamount of time.
Its easy to get confused about whether you would benefitfrom paid inclusion since the spider of any search enginewill eventually index your page without the additionalcost. There are both advantages and disadvantages to paidURL inclusion, and it is only by weighing your pros andcons that you will be able to decide whether to spring forthe extra cash or not.
The advantages are obvious: rapid inclusion and rapidre-indexing. Paid inclusion means that your pages will beindexed quickly and added to search results in a very shorttime after you have paid the fee. The time differencebetween when the regular spider will index your pages andwhen the paid spider will is a matter of months. The spiderfor paid inclusion usually indexes your pages in a day ortwo. Be aware that if you have no incoming links to yourpages, the regular spider will never locate them at all.
Additionally, paid inclusion spiders will go back to yourpages often, sometimes even daily. The advantage of this isthat you can update your pages constantly to improve theranking in which they appear in search engines, and thepaid URL inclusion spider will show that result in a matterof days.
First and foremost, the disadvantage is the cost. For a tenpage website, the costs of paid URL inclusion range from$170 for Fast/Lycos to $600 for Altavista, and you have topay each engine their annual fee. How relevant the costfactor is will depend on your company.
Another, and perhaps more important, disadvantage is thelimited reach of paid URL inclusions. The largest searchengines, Google, Yahoo, and AOL, do not offer paid URLinclusion. That means that the search engines you choose topay an inclusion fee will amount to a small fraction of thetraffic to your site on a daily basis.
Google usually updates its index every month, and there isno way you can speed up this process. You will have to waitfor the Google spider to index your new pages no matter howmany other search engines you have paid to update theirindex daily. Be aware that it is only after Google updatestheir index that your pages will show up in Google, Yahoo,or AOL results.
One way to figure out whether paid URL inclusion is a gooddeal for your company is to consider some common factors.First, find out if search engines have already indexed yourpages. To do this, you may have to enter a number ofdifferent keywords, but the quickest way to find out is toenter your URL address in quotes. If your pages appear whenyou enter the URL address but do not appear when you enterkeywords, using paid inclusion will not be beneficial. Thisis because your pages have already been indexed and rankedby the regular spider. If this is the case, your moneywould be better spent by updating your pages to improveyour ranking in search results. Once you accomplish this,you can then consider using paid inclusion if you want tospeed up the time it will take for the regular spider torevisit your pages.
The most important factor in deciding whether to use paidURL inclusion is to decide if its a good investment. Tofigure this out, you have to look at the overall picture:what kind of product or service are you selling and howmuch traffic are you dependent on to see a profit
If your company sells an inexpensive product that requiresa large volume of traffic to your site, paid inclusion maynot be the best investment for you; the biggest searchengines do not offer it, and they are the engines that willbring you the majority of hits. On the other hand, if youhave a business that offers an expensive service or productand requires a certain quality of traffic to your site, apaid URL inclusion is most likely an excellent investment.
Another factor is whether or not your pages are updatedfrequently. If the content changes on a daily or weeklybasis, paid inclusion will insure that your new pages areindexed often and quickly. The new content is indexed bythe paid spider and then appears when new relevant keywordsare entered in the search engines. Using paid inclusion inthis case will guarantee that your pages are being indexedin a timely manner.
You should also base your decision on whether or not yourpages are dynamically generated. These types of pages areoften difficult for regular spiders to locate and index.Paying to include the most important pages of a dynamicallygenerated website will insure that the paid spider willindex them.
Sometimes a regular spider will drop pages from its searchengine, although these pages usually reappear in a fewmonths. There are a number of reasons why this can happen,but by using paid URL inclusion, you will avoid thepossibility. Paid URL inclusion guarantees that your pagesare indexed, and if they are inadvertently dropped, thesearch engine will be on the lookout to locate themimmediately.
As you can see, there are numerous factors to consider whenit comes to paid URL inclusion. It can be a valuableinvestment depending on your situation. Evaluate yourbusiness needs and your website to determine if paid URLinclusion is a wise investment for your business goals.
Zaak OConan discovers and presents informationon to enhance your site, newsletter, marketing and otherInternet related topics. Youll find his other articles that expand your horizons at
Advertising your services or products on the Internet isboth extremely effective and extremely competitive. Thereare several ways to go about attracting traffic to yourwebsite; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choosefrom, along with developing an SEO, or search engineoptimization campaign. Both pay-per-click and SEO aretargeted to get your website placed as close to the top ofsearch engine results as possible. One of the differencesis that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaignversus months for a good SEO campaign.
Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising thatmost search engines, including some of the largest ones,now offer. It requires a bid for a per-click basis, whichtranslates to your company paying the bid amount every timethe search engine directs a visitor to your site. There isthe added bonus that when a per-click site sends yourwebsite traffic, your site often appears in the results ofother prevalent search engines.
As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages anddisadvantages. If you understand the process and monitoryour pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be veryeffective. One of the greatest advantages is that you neverhave to tweak your web pages to change your position insearch engine results, as you must do in a typical SEOcampaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-clickcampaign is pay a fee.
Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-clickprocess. You just bid and youre up and running. It doesntdemand any specific technical knowledge, though the moreyou know about search engines and keywords, the easier -and more effective - the process will be.
The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a biddingwar. A higher bid than yours will lower your position onsearch engine results. This means that you will have toraise your bid to regain your position - which canobviously become quite expensive, especially if you arebidding on a popular keyword.
In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effectiveform of marketing for your business, you must do somecomputing to figure out how much each visitor to your siteis worth. You can compute this value by dividing the profityou make on your website over a given period of time by thetotal number of visitors for that same time period. Forexample, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were2,5000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.
The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at whichyour business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to showa profit, not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, youare aiming at a figure less than 50 cents per click.
Be aware that the most popular keywords often costconsiderably more than 50 cents a click. The only wayaround this is to bid less for these phrases or you will bepaying too much for each individual hit.
The key (pun intended) to success is to learn everythingyou can about search engine keyword research. The good newsis there isnt a limit to the amount of keywords you canadd to your bid because additional keywords do not addadditional cost. This translates into a lot less hassle foryou because there is no need to optimize your site to indexa particular set of keywords.
Obviously, some keywords are much more effective thanothers are, but they will not cost you anything except timeto set-up your account in your pay-per-click bid. Of thepopular search engines that offer pay-per-click, one calledOverture provides an online tool that will give you thedata on how often particular keywords are entered intotheir search engine. They also offer suggestions forkeywords after you enter a description of your site.
In pay-per-click, this written description is crucial. Youmust understand that the object of your description is notto generally attract visitors, but to be as specific aspossible so that only those visitors who are likely to buyyour service or product go to your site. You must useexpert marketing copy to guarantee that your description isboth precise and enticing to attract the most idealcandidates to your site. This description is your mostpowerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable.
Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising isthat you constantly monitor your bid. It is very importantthat you bear in mind that the results of the top searchengines providing pay-per-click advertising, which areOverture and Adwords Select, usually appear on otherpopular search engines. Because of this, the competitionfor top ranking is intense, and very often you will findthat the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-clickto yield a profit.
If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid onthat particular keyword and try another one. Remember: whenyou pay too much per click to make a profit, you are inessence losing the bidding war.
Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan inplace to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword.It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least amonthly basis.
Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysisof visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge aboutconsumer motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoringand consumer analysis is essential to your overall businessneeds, and will also insure that your pay-per-clickcampaign is a success.
Zaak OConan discovers and presents informationon to enhance your site, newsletter, marketing and otherInternet related topics. Youll find his other articles that expand your horizons at